It’s time to bump up your ideal day exercise!

So, by now you should have spent a week refining your ideal day.  (If you missed last week’s blog, maybe you should go read that one first and then come back here.)  You’ve got a good idea of how you would like to live, who you want to share your  life with, and what “stuff” would make you happy.  “So,” you ask, “how do I figure out where to begin.  My life is really really far from my ideal?”

Here’s how:

Get yourself a piece of paper and pencil (you’ll probably want to erase!), or a Word or Excel file.  Whatever works for you.  You’re going to make a matrix where the columns are “People,” “Places,” “Things,” and “Activities.”  (Feel free to add any other columns that suit your purpose better.)

There are only 3 rows:  “Gotta have it to be happy (fulfilled, live my ideal day),” “Would be nice,” and “Frills.”  If it doesn’t fit into those three rows, throw it out!  It’s not going to make you happy.

Now go through your ideal day in your mind – or reading it if you wrote it down.  As you encounter each item, place it in the matrix in the appropriate box.  Is having a partner essential to your ideal day or a frill?  Is it essential that you live near the ocean to be happy or would it just be “nice.”  Only you can make those decisions.  Once you have gotten all the pieces of your ideal day sorted out, you will have a good idea of where to start.  After all, if playing the guitar is one of your frills, no matter how many classes you take, no matter how much you practice, you will not be closer to your ideal day if you don’t get the “gotta haves!”  However, if one of your “gotta haves” is to be a rock star on the guitar, then learning to play will make a big shift towards your ideal day.

This exercise gives you something to work towards.  A priority list, if you will.  Look at each item in the top row (and only in the top row!).  Which item looks like you could get it – or maybe just more of it – into your life right now?  Which one scares you the most?  (Sometimes that’s a clue to what you really really want and are afraid to go after because, what if you don’t get it?!?)

So the next obvious question is how do I get…  Once you are really clear on what you want, you will start noticing opportunities to get it.  You still have to repeat your ideal day to yourself at least twice a day – on waking and before going to sleep.  But if you want more practical advice, check out Wishcraft by Barbara Sher and Annie Gottlieb.  This is where I got these two exercises, although I have added some things to them.  The first half of the book is the “wish” part where you figure out what you would like to have more of in your life.  The second part of the book is the “craft” part which tells you how to go about getting to it.

Share your questions and comments on your quest to help inspire others!  I look forward to hearing from you.

It’s time to stop aging and start living!

You know who I’m talking to.  You may even be one!  You are the people who talk about where they’ve been,  not where they’re going.  You talk about your health – or everyone else’s – your last doctor visit or your next.  Nothing you say indicates that you have anything to look forward to…  Is that how you want to spend your final days?

Some of you will say, well, I’m trapped.  My partner (my children, my illness, my condition) will not allow me to do anything else.  Balderdash!  You always have a choice.  You can choose to embrace your limitations, or you can plan to exceed them.  Yes, your current condition will affect what you can do today and maybe even tomorrow, but let’s look beyond that.  What can you do today that will make things easier for you to progress tomorrow?

Here’s an interesting exercise:  design your ideal day!  Spend some time thinking about what your ideal day would be like.  Not a vacation day, not a weekend day, just an average get-up-in-the-morning-and-get-on-with-it day.  Start with waking up.  Do you wake up alone in bed or with a partner.  If you wake alone is it because you prefer to be alone or because your partner is down in the kitchen making you a lovely breakfast?  Or because your partner is off on the adventure that defines his or her life and that makes your life all the more interesting?

What does your bedroom look like?  Describe the size of the room, the furniture, the lighting conditions – whatever is important to you.  What do you do next?  Describe each action and each location with as much detail as you can.  Use the present tense in your descriptions.  Not I will have… but  I have; I do; I am…

Move through your whole day in your mind.  Don’t include any “real-world” conditions unless they are ones that already make you happy.  Maybe you’ll do this exercise in your head.  Maybe you’ll write it down.  Do whatever it takes to make it more real for you.  Spend some time each day going through this exercise, either in your head or by rereading what you’ve written.  The ideal times to do this are before you get out of bed in the morning and before you fall asleep at night.

Now it’s time to kick it up a notch!  Once you have your ideal day firmly planned, start to notice when you are actually living your ideal day!  OK, I can hear you say.  There is absolutely nothing in my day that resembles my ideal day!  Not true, I respond.  I can guarantee that no matter how far from ideal your current conditions are, there are portions of your current day that you will continue to do in your ideal day.  You’re probably going to shower on your ideal day, so when you are showering today, say to yourself Ideal day!  You are probably going to brush your teeth on your ideal day…  You get the picture.  The more often you can catch yourself living some portion of your ideal day, the sooner you will manifest even more of it.  It just gets you “in the mood!”

Will it be easy to change the habits of a lifetime?  Probably not.  Will it be worth it?  Only you can decide.  Next week, we’ll add another level to the exercise.  But in the meantime, have fun with it.  Dare to daydream.  Dare to dream.  Who knows where it will lead you?  What do you have to lose except the silent boredom you are living now?

The present moment is the only time you can change.

We spend so much time not being in the present moment.  We look at our pasts and regret them.  We spend time wondering what would have happened if…  We look into our futures and worry about them, plan for them, daydream about them.  But really, the present moment is the only time we have.  It is the only time we can act.  It is the only time we can make choices.  It is the only time that is available to us to change.

We cannot change the past.  We can, perhaps, change how we feel about it.  But we cannot undo the things we’ve already done or that have been done to us.

We cannot change the future.  We think we can.  We think we can do things differently than we have done in the past – but when push comes to shove, do we really do things differently?  We think we can do things differently than our parents did – and maybe we do.  But does that guarantee that things will turn out differently for us than they did for our parents?

But we can change this moment.  We can act in this moment.  We can change how we think or how we feel.  In this moment.  You may not think you have control over your emotions or your thoughts, but you do.  You can change how you feel just by observing what you are feeling.  Not thinking about it.  Not judging it.  Just by observing it.  See how it feels in your body.  Watch how it changes as you watch it.  They say that a watched pot never boils, but watched emotions change.  We cannot sustain strong emotions forever.  Try it.  Next time you feel a strong emotion, instead of trying to figure out where it came from or what it means, just watch it.  See what it changes into if you don’t try to change it.  See what it changes into if you don’t try to judge yourself for having that emotion.  Just watch and see what happens.

What if everything you learned in school was wrong?

Have you considered how your life would be different if things you learned in school were wrong?  Would there be a difference between things we were taught being deliberately wrong or accidentally wrong?  I’m not talking about things like mathematics which are based on premises we all accept such as that two plus two equals four.  It doesn’t matter if we call it four or squiggle.  We would all know that if we have two things in one hand and two in the other, we have the same quantity as someone else who has two in one hand and two in the other.  Or three in one hand and one in the other.  Even animals can count for some small numbers.

We can also discount history from this discussion as history is always written from the point of view of whoever is in power at the moment – usually the winners of the most recent conflict.  So most history should be taken with a grain of salt.

But can we believe the science we’ve been taught?  Or can we believe anything promoted by big business interests?  Pharmaceutical companies who slant their research?  Banks who promote unhealthy loans?  Insurance companies whose goal is profits rather than the health of the insurees?  Any advertising by any company?

When I was growing up, we believed.  We believed advertisers.  We believed history books.  We believed our governments.  I don’t think many of us believe any more.  It all feels like Santa Claus.

Are we so focused on teaching “facts” that we have stopped teaching the critical thinking skills necessary to advance knowledge and understanding?  Necessary to function in a society that may not have our individual best interests at heart?  “Facts” are easy to teach.  Reasoning is not only harder to teach, it is harder to measure, so it is harder to test for it and grade based on it.  But reasoning is what we need to do to navigate the conflicting claims of doctors, nutritionists, advertisers.  In short, anyone who wants to “sell” us something, even if that something is just information.

So maybe instead of just watching TV with your kids, you should be dissecting the information being presented.  Watch a commercial and then ask questions like “do you believe what they just told you?”  and “Why?” or “Why not?”  If the schools are not going to teach this – and mass media are certainly not going to teach this, it is now up to the parents and grandparents to teach it.